We’re already now less than a month away from Terry Bogard’s arrival as the first guest character ever in Street Fighter 6, and he’s not coming empty-handed either.
Capcom previously revealed a couple of very handy new features are going to be added to SF6 alongside the next DLC fighter, and there’s a couple of recent videos showing off more of how they’ll work in action.
We’ve already heard / seen a decent bit of information regarding the upcoming Virtual Rival as well as Replay Review systems that will be here in the near future, but it’s easier to get a sense of how it all comes together by seeing them in motion.
Curiousjoi recently put up a video of her time checking out both new features, and we also have another video out of Japan showing off much more of the V-Rivals matches especially from the Fighting Game Channel @Lethal Plan.
Starting out with the ability to take over replays, there will be a new option in the Replay Menu to “Switch to Player Control” where you can select either character to briefly play as while an interaction is unfolding.
You’ll then be given a small countdown before the action picks up and allows you to easily test out different tactics in a real match situation in a much faster and simpler way like we’ve previously seen in other fighters like Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R and Tekken 8.
It appears this moment can be reset at the press of a button to try again, so you can keep experimenting with situations and solutions like Joi showing off how to counter A.K.I.’s level 2 Super with Zangief.
As to how long you can stay in control of these instances, it’s still not fully clear, but the footage shows upwards of like 5 seconds or so after the countdown.
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In the new update, Li-Fen can be found in the Battle Hub alongside her battle simulation server Sim Sim where players can access the V-Rivals feature.
Taking a page out of Virtua Fighter 4’s book, users can take on specially trained AI combatants built off of presumably thousands of online matches across all skill levels.
There’s a few interesting aspects to this feature that we haven’t gotten to really see before, which Joi does show off a bit of in the footage.
Players are not locked to fighting an AI of their own rank or similar it turns out.
When you select “Battle a V-Rival,” the game will allow you to pick any character to go up againsts, and then it pops up with a League Search range where you can narrow the AI down to specific ranking levels like Diamond 2 as well as if they’re on Classic or Modern controls.
Once you complete the match, SF6 will pop up with tips and advice on what you can potentially improve upon though it seems fairly generic like “Pretty solid combos! Try adding some gauge juice into it for more damage!”
You can also ask Li-Fen directly about your recent matches in general where she’ll also provide feedback in a similar fashion too.
On top of that, You can also pit two V-Rival AIs against each other to see how they perform at different ranks, and you can battle an AI built on your own data to see what it’s like to play against you from the other side.
The Lethal Plan channel has match footage against a V-Rival Ken set to Master rank where they seem to praise the AI’s use of different tactics and mixups like going for throw loops and shimmies in the corner.
They also note the AI tends to move when inputting motions like a real person and not a robot that can hit perfect inputs all of the time.
Following that, they include match footage of two Master-ranked V-Rivals facing off between Cammy and M. Bison where they again note how it looks like we’re watching a real PvP match.
We’ve probably all seen at this point, however, how finnicky modern AI generation can be, so it’ll be very interesting to see if this all works as advertised once put out into the wild.
And unlike Tekken 8, you cannot fight against AI ghosts of other specific players other than yourself it seems.
V-Rivals and Replay Review are both set to come to Street Fighter 6 at the same time as Terry on September 24 as a free update for all players.
You can check out the new features in more detail below.